Head of Secondary School
A special congratulations go to Yr 12 student Marina Viese Vivaldi who was recently awarded the Mosman Young Citizen of the Year Award. Not only is Marina an exceptional Environment Captain at Redlands, she also lives the values of service and compassion outside of Redlands with her involvement in the volunteer groups, Vocal Rewind and Green Thumbs, exemplifying her passion for the environment and the arts.
Yr 12 Student Leadership Afternoon Tea
This week our Yr 12 Student Leaders hosted an afternoon tea for students from other schools. They engaged in trivia, played celebrity head, chatted, ate lovely food and posed for photos together. They were a wonderful group and left the teachers present (Mr Walker, Ms Martin, Ms Jansons and me) feeling the future is in safe hands!
RULER your Emotions
In last week’s Note Day I wrote about the recent course via Yale School of Emotional Intelligence attended by members of the School Executive. We already knew that emotions matter but we learned some valuable methods to support our wellbeing and success at school. Emotions influence our personal and professional lives throughout each day, guiding our thoughts and our interactions with others.
The four main areas of our lives affected by emotion are:
- Attention, memory, and learning
- Decision making
- Relationship quality
- Mental and physical health
Emotions matter now more than ever. Emotions affect everything we do both in and out of school. In the past few years, most of us have experienced a range of strong emotions related to the pandemic, political divides, racial unrest, natural disasters, and more. All of these emotions that we’re experiencing come from real events that are happening in our world. These strong emotions are not necessarily good or bad. They can help us focus on what’s important, and they can either bring us closer to or further away from achieving our goals. What matters most is being aware of the impact of our emotions and choosing to respond to them in helpful ways. By no means do we have all the answers or cures for all of the complex challenges in our schools, our nation, or our world. However, we believe embracing our emotional lives is a great place to start.
Recognising Emotion
The first R of RULER is for recognising emotion.
Recognising emotion refers to identifying emotion by interpreting:
- Our own thoughts and physiology (heart rate, body temperature, etc.)
- Cues in ourselves and others, including:
o Facial expressions
o Vocal tones
o Body language
o Words and behaviour
Practising this skill builds our self-awareness. When we pay attention to our own thoughts and behaviour, we begin to know and understand ourselves better. Recognising emotions also enhances our social awareness. When we look for clues about how others are feeling in their faces, voices, bodies, and behaviour, we begin to know and understand them better. We can use this information to guide how we respond to them.
Next time something significant happens – anything really – explicitly recognise your emotion with the family and ask your teengager to recognise their emotion/s too. At school, we tend to use the feelings wheel to support students to recognise their emotion/s. The mood meter is also useful.
Musical
A few tickets are still available for this year’s Musical, the Addams Family on Thu-Sat next week at The Concourse, Chatswood.
The Addams Family showcases the skills and talents of our Yrs 7-12 students and there are over 100 students involved on stage as performers, in the orchestra and in hair and make-up and production.
Redlands presents THE ADDAMS FAMILY, a comical feast that embraces the wackiness in every family, features an original story and is every father’s nightmare: Wednesday Addams, the ultimate princess of darkness, has grown up and fallen in love with a sweet, smart young man from a respectable family – a man her parents have never met. And if that wasn’t upsetting enough, Wednesday confides in her father and begs him not to tell her mother. Now Gomez Addams must do something he’s never done before – keep a secret from his beloved wife, Morticia. Everything will change for the whole family on the fateful night they host a dinner for Wednesday’s “normal” boyfriend and his parents.
Ms Gemma Van de Peer
Head of Secondary School
gvandepeer@redlands.nsw.edu.au
9968 9811